I’m toying with the idea of getting myself an AppleTV or HomePod to tinker with Apple Home a bit. I know I’ll have to use HomeBridge to connect HE with HomeKit so I can add my HE devices to Apple Home. But what I haven’t figured out yet is whether that integration is one way only (HE to HomeKit) or if it’s two way so I can see HomeKit connected devices in HE. Any HE and HomeKit users out there that can shed a light on this?
I think the only way to do this is to create virtual devices in HE and expose them to Apple Home via Homebridge. Then in Apple Home, have the HomeKit device mirrored with the virtual device (you will probably need to create rules in HomeKit).
I do something similar with my Ring Doorbell. When it senses motion, it flips a HE virtual switch that then triggers rules on the HE side.
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In my setup the only thing I use from Home Kit is presence. But as @rakeshg said, I have "Virtual Presence with Switch" devices in HE and Automations in Home Kit to control them. It is by far the most reliable presence solution I've found.
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On~Off devices can be linked back to HE devices via an intermediate virtual device but you can't link more complex devices that provide values like humidty or temperature or text like forecast should you have any. Radiator TRV's are awkward for example
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Upping the complexity level you could use HomeAssistant with their HA Homekit Bridge integration. I think they can expose those devices/capabilities. The idea would be to go from HE to HA via the community based "Home Assistant Device Bridge" then from HA to Apple Home. In similar fashion as HB.
Note: I have been playing around with both Homebridage and HA + HA Homekit Bridge and I prefer Homebridge - it handles video streaming like say from a Ring Doorbell much better and is a more complete solution in general. edit: when I say "much better" it just means I haven't gotten it to work in HA yet...
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I played with HA back in my Wink days to link Wink with HomeKit. I also tried HOOBS and found that Homebridge was the most consistent. This was about 2 years ago, so things may have changed. YAML was confusing as heck and for whatever reason, the devices would get out of sync frequently. Never had this issue with Homebridge. 
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Yep I would agree although at home I am now running HA with the Node-RED addon - that has given me some very cool capabilities and integrations. I think the UI has gotten better and people seem to love the dashboard.
I mentioned the Homebridge Ring integration - while the Ring video stuff works great, the HB Nodes in NR seem a little unreliable with motion and other stuff. I had moved over to HA's Ring-MQTT addon and am using that for basic Ring control. Still playing around with things though.
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The Home Assistant HomeKit Controller integration does sort of act like a HomeKit bridge, similar to the AppleTV and HomePod, But because this uses a non-commercial license, it cannot give you remote HomeKit access, and you cannot use Bluetooth devices that are compatible, unlike the Apple TV and HomePod are capable of doing.
They’re probably also will not be HomeKit Matter support through this noncommercial license. If you really want to play with HomeKit, I would suggest an Apple TV or HomePod as the HomeKit hub. There’s also another integration with Home Assistant that is simply called HomeKit, and this is similar to Homebridge, but not as good. You can’t decide which devices are brought over, unlike the plug-in for Hubitat and Homebridge. So you’ll get every single compatible device brought into HomeKit that Home Assistant has available.
But if you want a really nice mobile interface to your devices, easily accessed from an iPhone, iPad or Mac, I would strongly recommend an Apple TV or a HomePod, combined with Homebridge and the Hubitat MakerAPI app and plug-in for Homebridge. I have been using this for many years and it is a great and very convenient, fast access on the go from our iPhones.
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Just to clarify - because it confused me at first - The "HA HomeKit controller" mimics an Apple "Hub" - you can pair homekit devices with it apparently and use them in HA. Have not done this personally as I have no HK stuff.
The "HA HomeKit integration" acts as a bridge.. kind of like Homebridge does allowing you to expose devices from HA to Apples Home Hub. It works but seems less complete than HB.
So likely you'd have to setup the Controller and add your HK devices you want to it then bridge over to HE... or something like that. I wonder if you could also bridge back to Apple using either HA or HE/HB .... 
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You can bring stuff from HA to an actual HomeKit hub using the HomeKit integration for HA, but it sucks.
I did a lot of testing before Home Assistant Device Bridge was available. Thought I could use that as a way to get Home Assistant devices into habitat, but it turned out to be very underwhelming and had major limitations. I created very long, rambling (aka, my whining) posts about it. It was actually from these discussions that @ymerj got involved, and thus Home Assistant Device Bridge was born, for which I am very grateful, as it is so valuable to my smart home.
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I played around with the HB nodes but it did not work well for me. It combines multiple instances of HB (all instances on the local network) and pools the devices, Thus it would combine all devices from my live and test instances of HB. Since I have 2 instances of MakerAPI talking to two instances of HB and I could have the same HE device on both instances, it was pretty confusing.
I just ended up by using the virtual device and that works well. But my case may be an edge case.
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Yeah I remember that discussion! I am running 2 integrations as a test - In HA with Ring for Node-RED and HE stuff and just spun up a new instance of HomeBridge and am testing Ring integration there with my Apple Home setup - Have a Homepod Mini, MBP and some iPads, no iPhones.
HB Integration with Apple is great. HA Ring Integration with Node-RED works great too.. I agree with @SmartHomePrimer , the HA/HK Bridge is lacking.
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This discussion does remind me that I sometimes also use Homebridge plugins because they easier to work with than some of the others available, or they’re simply the only ones that work for me.
An example is my Deebot vacuum, where I could not, and subsequently after many different versions of Home Assistant, have not been able to get that to work, but the Homebridge plug-in for Deebot works perfectly and provides all I really need, which is to be able to tell it to clean specific rooms via Alexa. This is done using the aforementioned method of exposing virtual switches to Homebridge from Hubitat and then linking those to the Homebridge Deebot plug-in using HomeKit automations. I don’t like to use those kind of automations a lot if I can avoid it, because it can get really messy, especially if you have a problem with Homebridge and you lose all your automations. I’ve tried backing up HomeKit automations using the Controller app for iOS before, and it sort of works, but it’s just much easier to rebuild.
Another example are my Nest Protect smoke and CO detectors. I love these and they work fantastic, but are tied to a Google environment unless you can use a plug-in like the Homebridge Nest plug-in that allows you to use the alerts, thus triggering automations on Hubitat via virtual switches tied to HomeKit automations.
I also recently used Homebridge with a Broadlink RM4 Pro to use with our RF only ceiling fan. It is possible to add it to Home Assistant, and thus I could use the HE to HA integration to sync that with Hubitat via virtual switches and HA automations. However the HA integration for Broadlink seriously sucks to setup. But the Homebridge integration for the RM4 Pro is very simple to setup. So I once again used virtual switches and HomeKit automations to get control from Hubitat and thus, Alexa and Pico buttons.
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It sounds like I can bring some devices back, albeit with limited functionality (on/off etc), using virtual devices. That's alright, I'm doing something similar with Alexa as well. But I believe that answers my question, so thanks all for contributing!
This was something I was going to have a look at as well once I got HomeKit up and running. Can you back up your HomeKit configuration to somewhere? Or is the config already stored on Apple servers (iCloud presumably) and as such "doesn't need to be backed up"?
I have no idea if this is part of iOS 16 or not. It doesn't backup to the cloud in iOS 15 and earlier. There are folders you can backup on Homebridge and it will remove the need to bring all your devices and bridges back into HomeKit if it needs to be reloaded. However, this doesn't backup automations and it's a crapshoot at that. I've had success once, and then a failure the next time with this method. I think Hoobs has a backup method, but as mentioned, Homebridge is a lot more compatible with the huge amount of plugins available and seems faster in my experience.
The Controller app does backup automations, but I've had it complain about this or that thing or another, when trying to restore automations that worked with Homebridge plug-ins. That left me in the hole when I needed it most. So I really don't bother anymore. I run Homebridge on an old MacBook Pro, so my personal method for Homebridge backup is to simply use Apple Time Machine. Having said all this, I have not had a problem with Homebridge in a very long time (years), so I wouldn't be overly concerned that you're just going to have to constantly babysit this.
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